The Last Social Network: Your Own

Curt@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 99 points –

I just read Cory Doctorow’s article “Let the Platform Burn”. It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for some time. Instead of joining yet another social network and recreating yourself, why not create your personal social network object and link it to others via a federation of the personal social network objects?

I call this object the Earthling object with all due respect to our extraterrestrial readers. The object would be maintained by its owner and contain whatever information the owner choses to add such as a bio, pictures, blogs, posts, or documents. The object could contain links to your friends, family, and coworker objects.

Once set up, you could serve it yourself or use an Earthling Service Provider (yet to be invented). It would be a lot like running your own Lemmy instance or joining an existing one. The essential feature of this approach is that all the data within the object and access to it is completely under your control. Should you decide to ‘go dark’, you can delete or disconnect the object and disappear from the social networking community. Right up there in importance is that you can move this object around to any location you like without having to rebuild it. Communication would be along the lines of ActivityPub.

There are most certainly many issues with the concept and some of the features already exist. As Cory mentioned in his article, Mastodon allows you to export all your data from one instance and move it to another. Kbin seems to already provide at lot of these features with it’s magazines, microblog, and people sections.

While the Earthling object would have extensive controls on who sees what in your object, people might prefer not to keep all their eggs in one basket, joining different networks for different purposes and only providing personal data for the specific purpose. Did I mention that the Earthling object would have an avatar feature so you could take on multiple personalities?

This post is part entertainment and part ‘wouldn’t it be nice’. Maybe there are others out there that have already thought through this and are a lot further along. I believe there are similar efforts in the Web 3.0 arena. Anyone else interested in having their own Earthling object?

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I think you just reinvented personal websites? You can put on there whatever you want, and you can link it to anything else on the internet with the original open standard for communicating between networked computers.

We even had federations back then. Called them webrings. I'm not sure if I'm kidding.

I remember following a few rings. There were also website that would allow you to explore other websites.

webrings still exist, i have a website that's part of one. :)

That occurred to me as I wrote it. The main difference is the controlled connectivity with other 'web sites'. There's also tumblr. I still have a site there, haven't touched it in years.

I think that the thing that should set his idea apart from a website is that it has a highly structured data structure and restful API which allows the data to be accessed, aggregated, and presented in a myriad of ways.

So yes, you could have a standard "social profile" presentation front end which looks just like a geocities site, or Facebook page, or Friendster page or whatever.

But you could also add all your friends into a presentation layer that gives you a Facebook, Twitter, or instagram like feed, all federated from the single source of data they maintain as a federated social profile.

It's actually a pretty damn genius idea IMO.

Yea I see what you mean. I think mostly that functionality could be covered by RSS though. But maybe there is room for some extension

RSS is too general purpose to structure the data properly for use in the ways I described. You'd need a myriad of standardized tags for things like profile pictures, bio, interests, video updates, photo updates, etc. as each platform would only be interested in some subset of that depending on what kind of presentation it was trying to make.